They've either been moved, renamed, or changed drastically so that the result is not what the program was expecting.įor example, say a game relied on a function: DrawObjectToScreen(Object o, Point p) What this means is that sometimes when older programs attempt to access features in the newer frameworks, those features aren't there. Of course, being programs & libraries themselves, they get updated regularly with bug fixes, new features, improvements to the performance of older functions, and sometimes (especially major updates) a restructuring and rebuilding of the entire package itself. DirectX for example, is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video. things which every program needs to do, but don't need to be reinvented/rewritten every time you write a new program. If the game requires that version of the library, it won't run (properly) without it.įrameworks like DirectX, OpenGL etc are (basically) just collections of common functions i.e.

Short answer: Yes, It's fine to install it.

Directx 8.1 windows 7